


The Wind In His Sails

by linndechir



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Dialogue Heavy, M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-04
Updated: 2017-06-04
Packaged: 2018-11-09 03:36:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,485
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11096061
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/linndechir/pseuds/linndechir
Summary: “That's what everyone always says. It's whispered again and again, a myth perpetuated until everyone accepts it as truth, until nobody even dares to find out if it was ever founded in reality or only in fear. Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes truth. Nobody ever leaves here. You can't win this war. The Empire is inevitable.” James paused and let his eyes wander over the fields that surrounded them, the guards chatting to each other in the shade, the labourers sharing water. “Maybe they're right about the Empire, but they're not right about this place.”





	The Wind In His Sails

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thenightpainter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thenightpainter/gifts).



The first days passed in a haze. The rage that had kept him going for so long through all his injuries and his exhaustion evaporated the moment Thomas's arms closed around him, leaving nothing behind but a profound weariness that even his relief and his disbelieving joy could not alleviate. The first day, he was too tired to ask how or why, to do anything but cling to Thomas, to follow him to the small wooden hut he seemed to live in. There were a thousand things to talk about, but Thomas shushed him. His beard was scruffy and unfamiliar when he kissed James, his hands were so much rougher than he remembered when they washed and bandaged his wounds, when his fingertips retraced dozens and dozens of scars. But his eyes were still as bright as the summer sky, as bright as a promise of things that James had stopped believing in a long time ago.

 

He slept in Thomas's arms for what must have been a day, woke to Thomas's hands stroking his back and the sun bathing him in golden light. He realised only then that it was odd that Thomas seemed free to stay with him in the middle of the day, and when he said as much, Thomas only smiled and told him he'd called in a few favours. Somehow James wasn't surprised that even in a place like this, in circumstances such as these, Thomas was a man everyone liked to help out.

They talked, then. About how Thomas had come to be here, once his father had given up hope that Bedlam would break his spirit and turn him into the obedient son Alfred Hamilton had wanted. About how James had left London, where he'd gone, what he'd done. He spoke of Miranda, a whispered confession that he'd failed to protect her when that should have been the foremost thing on his mind. If it were anyone else, he could have lied, about her death, about what James had turned himself into to avenge Thomas, to avenge her, but he couldn't find the strength in himself anymore to twist words and find excuses, he couldn't bring himself to lie to eyes that still looked at him with a love he wasn't sure he deserved. A love that never faded even when it was joined by grief, not when James spoke of Miranda, or of Thomas's father, not when he confessed to all the men he'd murdered in cold blood, including men he'd called his friends.

“I lost you, and found you again at the end of the world,” Thomas whispered against his lips, his hands cradling James's head again like something precious. “Fate has brought us back together, and I won't let anything part us again. Not even your shame.”

 

It took James days to stop feeling like he was in the middle of a fever dream, the kind that taunted him with a happiness he'd never find again. Even when Thomas's favours ran out and he had to get back to work – and James felt the familiar flame of anger roar up when he heard some guard bark orders at the best man he'd ever known – James stayed by his side. The plantation didn't treat prisoners like them as badly as its slaves – they worked shorter hours, were given easier tasks, and James's still healing injuries meant that he was exempt from hard work for now. But he refused to leave Thomas's side, and he kept his eyes open, and he learnt.

He studied the guards' routines, the paths they walked and rode every day, and the parts of the plantation they mostly ignored. He watched out which guards seemed particularly vigilant and stern, which ones seemed lazy and distracted, which ones could easily be bribed for a favour. He watched out which of the prisoners seemed content with their lot and which ones glared at their captors with bale, which of the slaves had made peace with their situation and which ones looked like they were waiting for an opportunity to run.

It wasn't all that different from studying the first pirate crew he'd joined, but he didn't plan on waiting four months this time before taking charge.

“What are you thinking about?” Thomas asked when he joined him with a flask of water in the midday heat. Their shoulders brushed, and Thomas put a familiar hand on James's knee. After that first day – when the shock of seeing Thomas, alive and well, had been too great to even notice anyone else around them – James had wondered that none of the guards ever pulled them apart. Thomas's smile had been sad when he'd explained that he wasn't the only one sent here for the crime of loving another man, and that even some of those who might have preferred a woman's company had learnt to make do considering the far smaller number of available women on the plantation. As long as nobody made trouble, the guards didn't seem to care much.

James looked down at Thomas's hand, the callouses and scars on his skin, the dirt under his nails. His hands were still beautiful, long-fingered and slender, and much stronger than they had been in London. He wondered just how much profit Thomas's hands had already brought their so very kind master, in addition to the money Alfred Hamilton had paid him to make a good man disappear. He tried not to think about the money Silver had paid that same man to make James disappear. The sting of that betrayal was still too raw, too painful even with Thomas's warm breath washing gently over his skin.

“I'm thinking about getting us out of here,” James said eventually, keeping his voice to a low whisper even though there was nobody within earshot. The plantation was huge, and for all its guards it was impossible for them to have eyes on every part of it at all times. Like all slave plantations, and he'd heard enough about that from Madi and her people, its order relied mostly on the fear of what happened to those who ran, the fear of the unknown that waited outside the plantation, and the knowledge that there was nowhere to run to.

Thomas's smile, a near constant these past few days, wavered.

“Nobody ever leaves here, James,” he said, gently still, his fingers curling around James's. The resignation in his voice, in that same voice that had once spoken of impossible obstacles as trifles to be done away with by the sheer force of his vision and his beliefs, cut James deeper than the callouses on his hands or the deep lines around his eyes.

“That's what everyone always says,” he replied, and Thomas must have seen something new in his eyes when James met his, something that made him pause. “It's whispered again and again, a myth perpetuated until everyone accepts it as truth, until nobody even dares to find out if it was ever founded in reality or only in fear. Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes truth. Nobody ever leaves here. You can't win this war. The Empire is inevitable.” James paused and let his eyes wander over the fields that surrounded them, the guards chatting to each other in the shade, the labourers sharing water. “Maybe they're right about the Empire, but they're not right about this place.”

Thomas followed his gaze and shook his head.

“This is not a matter of philosophy, it's not about the perpetuity or the fragility of power. It's walls and guards and hounds.” His thumb rubbed circles over James's palm, a soothing motion that only strengthened James's resolve. “When did I become the pragmatist and you the dreamer? This is not something you can talk or fight your way out of.”

“No, it just isn't something that one man can talk or fight his way out of, or two, or ten.” There was something painfully familiar in this, in thinking like this, in seeing pieces fall into place before his inner eye. “But if every man in here rises up to burn the whole place to the ground … do you really believe walls and guards and hounds will be enough to stop them?”

He realised then that it wasn't doubt he saw in Thomas's eyes, but fear. James had lived in seething anger for a decade, but Thomas, he realised, Thomas had lived in fear, fear of losing what bit of safety he'd had left. James moved into his touch when Thomas took his face between his hands and leant his forehead against his.

“I can't lose you again,” he said softly, and James felt that same fear curl in his stomach. It was a terrifying thing, to have something to lose again.

“And I can't watch you be a slave to the Empire that destroyed our lives,” he said, his hands curling around Thomas's arms, gripping him tight. “You were the one who taught me how to look at the world and make it what it should be, instead of accepting it for what it is, so that's what I'm going to do.”

“ _I_ haven't looked at the world like that in a long time.” It sounded like a confession, like an admission of failure, as if Thomas had had a choice in the matter, chained up and captured as he'd been. But he nodded and kissed James, a quiet agreement when he'd never been shy to argue with him.

 

They were stretched out on the narrow straw mattress Thomas called his own, their bodies pressed close together despite the unrelenting evening heat. James kissed sweat drops from Thomas's brow while Thomas retraced some of the scars on James's chest – he'd made James recount the story of every one of them in the first days; after all those years apart, there were too many things they didn't know about each other, too many things they could only whisper to each other at night as if that could make up for lost time. Few of those memories were pleasant, Thomas's no more so than James's, and yet they both still preferred to share that pain now that they had someone to share it with.

More and more often their conversations were about the future now rather than the past. James schemed and planned, and Thomas provided him with almost a decade's worth of knowledge about the plantation – he knew every single guard and every single prisoner, and the list of those that owed him a favour or were simply well-disposed towards him was endless. Thomas had never been a trouble-maker – and there was guilt in his voice when he admitted that – and in an attempt to feel like he was doing at least some good, he'd learnt his fair share about wounds and illnesses from an old slave woman before she'd passed away a few years ago. The slaves were unsurprisingly not too fond of the white labourers whose families had paid for them to be treated more generously, but there were still a few among them Thomas was on friendly terms with after helping them in the past.

So they schemed and planned and whispered to those Thomas trusted enough, and waited for the last of James's wounds to mend.

“There's one problem,” James said quietly after a few minutes of silence, his fingers playing carefully with Thomas's hair. It was lighter than it had been in London, now that it was constantly exposed to the sun rather than covered by wigs at all times. In the dim light of their candle it gleamed like beaten gold.

“What's that?”

“In order to make any of this happen … I'd have to become him again.” He'd felt that rage hammering against his temples, making his skin feel too tight, since he'd first started thinking about escape, that sharp, calculating edge that looked at people and saw nothing but obstacles and tools. 

Thomas's hand stilled on his chest. He was quiet for a moment, but he understood. “Flint.”

“He was to be left behind, died at sea so I could be with you.” James swallowed. It was not a decision that had been Silver's to make, nor did he think Silver had truly understood why James would ever be willing to let Flint go. It wasn't that Thomas being alive undid the tragedy that had created him – the pain and grief of those endless years couldn't be eased or unmade by anything. It was that James had not been able to stand the thought of Thomas seeing what he'd become.

“He _is_ you, James,” Thomas said. He cupped James's cheek to make him meet his eyes. “You cannot be something for twelve years and then cast it aside like an old cloak, pretending that your actions have not shaped you. You look at a slave plantation and think about starting a revolt – that's not the way James McGraw looked at the world. You can bury Captain Flint under denial, but you cannot unmake him. So you might as well use him.”

“I don't want you to see what he's capable of.” Thomas had never seen what James McGraw had been capable of either, only the polite London version of him, not the sailor, the soldier; but Flint was all the worst parts of James McGraw amplified a thousand times.

Thomas seemed strangely unconcerned. When he nudged James's nose with his, there was enough tenderness in that simple gesture that James felt his chest tighten.

“I've already seen him,” Thomas said. “I've seen you. You can't separate yourself from him, and neither shall I.” He paused, and the smile that formed on his lips now was almost grim. “And, frankly, why you'd think I would mind helping you burn this place to the ground is beyond me.”

James pulled back enough to meet Thomas's eyes. They were darker in the dim light, dark and serious and almost _angry_.

“That's not the way Lord Thomas Hamilton looked at the world,” James said carefully.

“Ah.” Thomas began to smile again, that smile he'd reached at the end of so many a conversation when he'd talked circles around his counterpart until their mind finally caught up with his and reached on its own the conclusion he had hoped to guide it to. It was a little smug, maybe, but never maliciously so. It took joy in its success, but only because both that success and that joy were to be shared. “You think?”

 

“Some people are so afraid to fight for their freedom that they'll do anything to stay in chains,” Madi had said to him once, and James – Flint had nodded in grim agreement. Not all chains were made of iron; some were wrapped tightly around men's mind until they could barely imagine freedom anymore. Until they could barely imagine a world in which their choices were their own.

So maybe they shouldn't have been surprised when their whispers reached the wrong ears – those of the eldest scion of a noble family that had decided a gambling drunkard made for an awful heir and conveniently sent him off to the New World so his more responsible younger brother could inherit the family fortune. Thomas might have called him a friend, or had at least been friendly with him, so he tried to talk the man down when he confronted them, when he threatened to tell the guards about what they were planning to do. 

James listened, standing a few steps behind Thomas, and thought that this idiot would have been eaten alive among the Lords as much as anywhere else in the world. A fool so afraid of any serious consequences to his actions that he hadn't simply sold them out, but instead talked to them in a remote enough corner of the plantation that nobody could hear them. He probably thought himself smart for it, too.

Thomas talked, and James listened, and it didn't take long until all three of them realised that talking wouldn't get them anywhere. Thomas kept trying, though, even as the man's eyes more and more often darted to James. The men on the plantation didn't know who he was, but they knew _what_ he was – the clothes he had arrived in, the metal stud in his ear, the scars on his body, the wary look in his eyes. Deep down men were still animals, and animals tended to recognise predators instinctively. He still didn't have the good sense to try and run when James stepped closer, put a hand on Thomas's arm, and shook his head minutely. He wondered if Thomas saw the difference in his eyes, if he knew it was Flint he was looking at rather than James.

James expected him to argue, but apparently he had waited for long enough that Thomas himself had realised the futility of words. He stood back, and James fought down the sickening feeling in his gut when he felt Thomas's eyes following him, watching him do what needed to be done.

He was quick about it – the man didn't put up much of a fight, or rather no fight that gave James even the slightest bit of trouble – but killing a man was never a pretty affair, not even something quick and clean as breaking his neck. But Thomas didn't look away, his eyes wide. It couldn't have been the first time he'd seen a man die, or even the first time he'd seen a man killed, not after everything he'd been through this past decade. But it had to be the first time he watched a man he loved murder someone, and as James dropped the no longer struggling body to the ground he expected that love to fade from Thomas's eyes. No matter how long he kept looking, it didn't.

They were quiet for the longest time on their way back to the little hut they shared, but Thomas took his hand, the same hand he'd just seen James kill someone with, and held on to it tightly.

“I can't believe I just let you murder a man,” he said eventually.

“You didn't _let_ me do it,” James corrected. It had been a long time since anyone had told him to do or not to do anything. “You simply didn't try to stop me.”

“That's a mere semantic difference and you know it.”

“It would have been far more hypocritical to protest on principle when you knew I was going to do it anyway,” James said. He found his voice sounding harder than it usually did, but Thomas had wanted this. Thomas had agreed to this. If only Flint could get them out of here, then James would let him off the leash one last time. And if Thomas ended up hating him for it, it would still be worth his freedom.

But there was no hatred or disgust in Thomas's eyes. He still pulled James into his arms that night and kept kissing his protests from his lips while he covered his body with his own, wrapped his spit-slick hand around both their cocks until James came apart underneath him and stopped worrying at least for a little while.

Afterwards, when they'd kissed each other clean and James had come to rest on top of Thomas, his head on Thomas's chest and Thomas's hand stroking his head, he could almost believe that Thomas would stay true to his word, that nothing James could do would drive a wedge between them.

“I'm starting to think that when someone says an enemy's victory is inevitable,” Thomas said suddenly, after such a long silence that James thought he might have already fallen asleep rather than be lost in his thoughts, “they mean that in order to defeat them, you inevitably have to make choices that you are not prepared to make. Do things you don't believe yourself capable of doing.” He paused, and only when James raised his head to look up at him, he asked, “Is that what you think Captain Flint is? The man who could make the inevitable choices James McGraw could not?”

James had never thought of it in those exact words, but it was what he'd believed himself when he had made Flint into a monster, something to be feared and dreaded, something that couldn't be stopped any more than you could stop the ocean itself. Of course Thomas knew him as well as he knew himself, could still read his innermost thoughts that he'd believed so well hidden. He nodded and put his head back on Thomas's chest, listened to his steady, slow heartbeat.

“I think I understand him much better now,” Thomas said after a while.

 

For the longest time, they didn't speak of where they'd go once they had escaped this place, of what they'd do. Once, when Miranda had still been alive, James had let himself dream of a quiet life far from the sea, no more fighting, no more killing, no more suffering. In his own way, maybe Silver had tried to offer him just that, but he should have known better than to expect James to accept a yoke for the rest of his life, for himself and even less so for the man he loved. But the moment he'd laid eyes on Thomas, the moment he realised that he had something left in the world, something worth living for, he'd let himself dream of it again. Not in detail, just a fleeting daydream of green meadows, of fresh air that lacked the sea's saltiness, of waking up in a soft bed by Thomas's side every morning.

A few days before they were ready, they were sitting by the fields during one of the breaks they were so kindly granted. The slaves were still toiling not too far from them – after all nobody had paid for them to be treated well, and while they still weren't worked as cruelly here as James had seen on some of the plantations they'd tried to free, their master here still seemed quite convinced of their ability to work much harder than the white prisoners.

“How many other places are there like this, James?” Thomas asked after a while, having followed James's gaze. James gave him a surprised look. They'd never spoken of any of this back in London, when these plantations had been but vague images in both their minds that generated profit and trade. James had hardened himself to worse sights in his life, but Thomas had always had a kinder heart than him, and no kind heart could look upon any of this and not feel pity. 

“The New World was supposed to be our rebirth,” Thomas continued, shaking his head, “a chance to create an Eden rather than repeat our sins, and we turned it into an extension of England's hells instead.”

Something had changed in Thomas ever since they had decided to escape, like he'd woken from a long, deep slumber, like he'd remembered that there was more to life than survival. James had fallen in love with his visions once, with that bright-eyed belief that the world could be a better place if the right men set their mind to it. Even in simple white linen, with deeper lines around his eyes and an unkempt beard on his face, he suddenly looked just like he had in his salons in London, a man who saw the world as an opportunity for change rather than as a cross to bear.

“Your friend, Madi, do you know where she is now?” Thomas asked suddenly. James raised an eyebrow. He'd told Thomas everything he'd worked on these past years, of Nassau and the Spanish gold, of the pirates' alliance with the Maroons, of their plans for a war, shattered by one betrayal.

“I only know she's alive. Whatever else he did, he wouldn't have harmed her.” It was about the only thing he could be sure of, when Silver might well have lied about everything else.

“Then we could find her,” Thomas said, and smiled as if the brightest idea had occurred to him. Smiled the same way as when he'd suggested to pardon every pirate in Nassau and James had thought he'd lost his mind. The same confusion must have shown on his face now, because Thomas asked, “Could you walk away from all this? From everything you've fought for all these years? After everything we've still lost? Miranda, our home, the years we could have shared?”

James looked away. Something heavy clamped around his chest, and even the steadying weight of Thomas's arm around his shoulders didn't alleviate the pressure. Suddenly he felt old, his limbs heavy, his flesh aching, his scars itching as if they wanted to burst open again.

“Walking away from this was all I wanted for – ” He didn't finish the sentence, didn't even remember a time when his rage hadn't gone hand in hand with a deep weariness. He'd gone on because he had owed it to Thomas, and to Miranda, but he'd never wanted Flint's life. “I've been doing nothing but fighting for so long.”

“I know, my love,” Thomas said. He made those last two words sound so certain, as if nothing in the world could bring him to doubt them. His arm tightened around James's shoulders, and James let himself sink against him, not caring whether anyone saw. “And if you cannot fight any longer, if what you truly want is peace, I will be the last man on this Earth to judge you for it. I would follow you to the end of the world and never again make another soul's concerns mine own except yours. And I would be happy.”

James listened to Thomas's breathing, let himself savour every second of his closeness. There were so many things he'd almost forgotten in the past decade, so many details that were hard to remember, and he'd hated himself for every moment in Thomas's presence he'd wasted back then. He wouldn't repeat that same mistake now.

“But could you do it?” Thomas went on. “Knowing what we could have achieved, knowing what we gave up, would you _find_ peace? You've fought for twelve years and it's worn you down to the bone, I can see that. But I had given up for twelve years, on the world and on myself, and I can tell you it gnaws at you from the inside out, hollows you out until you don't recognise yourself anymore. You wake up every morning and go through your day like a ghost, like an empty shell that has no purpose anymore.”

James closed his eyes for a moment. For all that they'd spent long nights talking, it was hard to wrap his mind around the fact that Thomas had spent close to ten years in this place, going through the same mind-numbing routine every day, his brilliant mind locked up with itself with nothing to aim its ideas at. It must have been a worse torture for Thomas than anything else that had been done to him. He didn't even have any books, except for a tattered Bible he'd already known half by heart ten years ago.

“And what if I was wrong,” James asked softly, “and there's nothing but death and defeat at the end of all I'd hoped to accomplish?”

“If you'd believed that, you would have given up much earlier.” 

James could hear the smile in his voice, the confidence. James remembered the words he'd spoken to Silver not too long ago – that he couldn't believe man was made so poorly that he could only ever live under a yoke. Thomas had taught him not to believe that.

James couldn't imagine that turning his back on the world once they were free would gnaw at him, not when he had Thomas with him, not when all he wanted was to keep him safe. But Thomas, Thomas had been ripped out of the world when he'd just been about to change it. It would have been cruel beyond measure to take that away from him again.

“I see you still haven't lost your faith in all these years,” he said finally. Thomas laughed.

“In God or in mankind?”

James, who had never had much faith in either, said, “Both?”

“God didn't put me here,” Thomas said. He sounded like he'd given it a lot of thought, but then James supposed he'd had a very long time to think about it. To rage at the heavens, just like James had, and then to find the kind of peace in his faith that James had never truly understood. “But he did help me survive for long enough to see you brought back to me.”

“And in mankind?” James asked. They'd argued about that for endless hours in Thomas's study back in London, a lifetime ago. Thomas had been so optimistic then, so full of conviction that there was goodness in man. James had thought it naïve at first, and then he'd started wondering what could be achieved if more people saw the world the way Thomas saw it.

“I always believed that every man could be taught to be good,” Thomas said. “But I've also come to understand that some of them don't want to learn.”

Not even three days had passed since Thomas had watched him kill a man – had he counted as one who didn't want to learn? What did that make James then, who'd killed people he'd cared for far more, for lesser offences? “And where do men like me fall in all that?”

“Men like you are who God sends to guide the rest of us,” Thomas said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. James found himself unsurprised that Thomas could still make him speechless.

“I could say the same about you,” he replied eventually. Thomas's memory had guided him even when he'd been long gone; his vision had remade James, had made him find parts of himself he'd barely even known of.

“I told you once before that everybody needs a partner.” Thomas laughed softly, and his voice sounded almost serene, as if they weren't planning a slave revolt that could get them both killed, as if they hadn't just discussed to keep fighting after today, to continue what Flint and Madi had started, to bring the world that had ruined their lives the war Flint had promised it.

He wasn't sure if it was God Thomas had faith in, or mankind, or James, but he did know that the only thing he'd ever believed in was Thomas.

 

Every rebellion was a bloody affair, but guards ruled with fear, and one thing Flint had always been good at was making men fear him more than anything or anyone else. Being able to promise all those men and women their freedom at the end of that fight only made it easier. 

They left behind bloodied corpses and scorched earth, and for all that Thomas felt some responsibility for the men they'd freed, James made it clear to all of them that evading anyone sent to capture them was easier in smaller groups. In the end only the two men Thomas had called his closest friends on that plantation remained with them, an old friend Thomas had already known in London and whom he'd believed dead until they had found each other again on the plantation, and a 17-year-old boy Thomas had taken under his wing.

Thomas had remained by James's side throughout all of it, steadfast and strong, and the first time they made halt and rested for a little while, Thomas washed the blood off James's hands and face and kissed him so hard that James gasped for breath. He kept kissing him until one of their companions cleared his throat and suggested they keep going, and Thomas looked almost a little drunk on their freedom.

_“I'm not afraid of anything you are, James,” he'd whispered against James's lips the night before. “I may not approve of every single choice you've made, but don't believe there aren't things I have done these past ten years that I'm ashamed of. You and I, we are what we made each other.”_

 

A week later they were on a ship headed south; they'd taken enough valuables from the plantation's manor with them to keep them afloat until they'd reached their destination. Flint had kept an eye and an ear open in port, had heard all about the deal the Maroons had signed, and he knew Madi well enough to harbour no doubt that _she_ most certainly hadn't signed it. It wasn't a surprise – Silver had told him what he'd done, after all, all the big and small betrayals that had ripped their efforts to pieces, but James had faced impossible odds before, had won unwinnable battles. And he'd done all of that alone, without Thomas by his side – now that Thomas was with him again, awoken from the fear of captivity, with all his visionary brilliance burning so bright again that it all but blinded James, he had no doubt that they'd claw their way out of the darkness Silver had plunged them all in.

He'd never seen Thomas on a ship, or rather not on a ship that had set sail, and he only realised that on the second day as he watched Thomas stand up by the rail, looking out over the endless ocean with a smile on his face. James had dreamt of walking away from the sea for so long. Now he doubted he was going to get that particular wish, but the thought weighed less heavily on him than he would have thought when he joined Thomas.

They were more careful here than they'd been on the plantation, but James still pressed his shoulder against Thomas's, let himself feel his warmth. Thomas had shaved his beard and bought new clothes that made him look – not like a prisoner anymore, and certainly not like a pirate, but like a man who dealt with pirates maybe. The brown leather vest made him look taller still, more imposing, or maybe that was merely the fact that ten years of labour had made him broader, stronger than he'd been in London. There was something steadying about Thomas's solid presence by his side – Miranda had been his partner for a decade, but she hadn't been with him when he'd fought his battles, had only been able to piece him back together when he crawled home bloodied and broken. He wasn't planning on ever staying away from Thomas for that long.

They spent a long time in companionable silence, Thomas visibly enjoying the ocean spray on his face, the salty smell of the air. James couldn't blame him. The sea had long lost any mysticism for him, but even he still remembered the first time he'd set sail, away from England, when he'd been but a boy, and that dizzying feeling of endlessness ahead of him. He couldn't imagine how it had to feel to a man who'd been confined to one place for a decade.

After a while he asked, “What name shall I give them, when we arrive?”

Thomas only gave him a questioning glance – his eyes looked impossibly blue against the sky and the ocean, and James found himself lost in them for a moment before he remembered to explain. “You wouldn't be the first man to give himself a new name in the New World.”

On the plantation the prisoners had only been allowed to use their first name, or a nickname to distinguish between a multitude of Thomases and Edwards and Henries. No titles, no grand old family names. It had been supposed to encourage humility among the poor misguided souls they supposedly all were.

“You're asking if I wish to give up my father's name,” Thomas said, his voice hardening a little, the way it always did at any mention of Alfred Hamilton. There were things James had begged Thomas's forgiveness for, but his father's death had not been one of them. Thomas didn't seem to think James needed to be forgiven for it. “I did give it some thought. If we try to build something new here, something founded on higher principles, wouldn't I want to do it under a name of my choosing?”

He smiled, as quick and bright as a ray of sunlight catching on the sails. “Under yours, maybe. Thomas McGraw – I rather like the sound of that.”

James didn't know what to say – McGraw had barely been his own name for so long, and even when it had been, he'd never considered sharing it with anyone of his own volition. He'd gladly give it to Thomas, though, if he were to become Captain Flint again anyway. He'd even gladly have them both use it, and damn anyone who dared to raise questions about it. They might have had to tread cautiously on the ship they were on now, but after that James was not planning on hiding what Thomas meant to him ever again.

Before he could think of a reply, though, Thomas already continued, “But I shall not give my father that satisfaction in death, to disown and disavow myself, to absolve him from my sins. I shall give him the legacy he expected of me. A legacy of shame and dishonour, his name synonymous with rebellion and disobedience. He always accused me of tainting our family's name, so I might as well oblige him in that.”

James found himself smiling, a grim, but approving expression that never would have found its way onto James McGraw's face. Or maybe it would have, and James had merely never noticed it. Maybe Thomas was right, that Flint was a part of him, born not only out of James McGraw's grief, but out of who he'd already been before losing Thomas. Who Thomas had made him. James had created Flint as a tool to make Thomas's vision reality, so maybe it was only fair that Thomas got to wield that weapon himself now.

“It's not too late yet to turn back,” he still said, as if he didn't know both of them far better than that.

Thomas covered James's hand with his own on the railing, their bodies hiding the touch from anyone who might be glancing in their direction, and squeezed his hand firmly. Thomas's presence by his side wasn't like an anchor in a stormy harbour, no, it was like the wind in his sails, like the sweetest breath of air after drowning for years. James leant into him, breathed him in, drank him in. 

“James, my love,” Thomas said, his lips brushing over James's temple, “it's been too late for us to turn back since I first laid eyes on you.”


End file.
